i'm personally a fan of AMD's . As with nihil, even the Duron's have treated me good.

as far as the 2.4 P4's... if you *know* that you are the kind of person who will NEVER get into hardware upgrades, etc... then it's not by any means a bad deal. If you want the option of going up in the future, don't bother with it. For the most part, 2.4 GHz will run most apps rather nicely. If you are doing renderings, animation, etc, then you definitely want to know what your NEEDS are.